


Snowballed

by creativeandartsyname



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Musings on the world of V3 at large, Speculative fiction, Twin AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 01:59:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14486340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creativeandartsyname/pseuds/creativeandartsyname
Summary: Ouma Kokichi had a twin and he's the one responsible for Ouma Kokichi's existence. Heavy V3 spoilers for the entire game.





	Snowballed

“ _I want to enjoy this game filled with suspicion and betrayal from the bottom of my heart!_ ”

In the pitch black room, the only light being the sickly blue-green from the screen of the phone, those words sounded as if they blasted from large speakers propped in the four corners of the small space. 

He watched, his smile mirroring the grin of the wildly gesticulating boy on screen, his heart swelling.

“ _There are people in this world who spread grief and misery for no reason than the thrill of it!_ ”

Malice. Bitter, bitter malice dripped from those words like blood and poison flowing from a venomous dagger wound.

“ _And I’m one of those people. Nothing pleases me more than inflicting pain on others!_ ”

The malice, the sadism, the anger and hatred directed everywhere and at everyone in those words gripped his stomach and clenched. He saw the horror on Saihara Shuuichi’s face, the murderous anger of Harukawa Maki’s gaze and Yumeno Himiko’s desperate, tear stained confusion and knew what they were thinking so exactly that it physically hurt.

That person was a monster.

That monster was supposed to be him. 

* * *

 

 

_“You can be someone else entirely!”_

No matter how many promises of glory, pride and recognition Team Danganronpa could promise from surviving (or winning) the game, he couldn’t think of a reason anyone auditioned for the show besides that singular, tempting promise that was plastered across every TV ad, every electronic billboard, every internet banner advertisement.

 “I want to be _someone else_ ,” was the underlying plea of every auditioning contestant. Suicide was for those who wanted to die. Danganronpa was for those who wanted to live, but _differently_.

Nobody wanted to admit that entering the game was rolling a ball on a 16-slotted roulette wheel and hoping that it landed on one of the two spaces labeled “survivor”. A strange, but expected, cultural blindness was always present when it came to talking about one’s hopes and dreams of being chosen. People discussed what they would pitch to get on the show, how their characters would figure out the mystery, what kind of characters they could see their future selves falling for or hating, how they would kill and what their execution would be… but never the aftermath after the curtain falls and an “X” is slapped across their trial portrait.

But everyone knew what happened in the games. Everyone knew that the people who went into it, who became someone else and lived out the lives that so many desperately wanted to live out, were not going to come out again. Even if they made it to the end, if they defeated this year’s Junko Enoshima in a glorious debate of hope versus her cyclic despair, they were irreparably part of the world of Danganronpa. A fictional world no one outside of the game could enter without becoming a part of it. They didn’t rejoin society, they left the school and left everyone’s sight, off into the great beyond of “repairing a world racked by despair”, or “journeying across the desert to find home”, or “finding a way out of a world submerged in water” (or whatever conclusion there was to the Junko-backed despair-filled background of this season’s plotline). They became smashed in the pages of the Danganronpa saga, 2-dimensional characters that would never walk among the flesh and blood again.

But it was worth it. Youth was what mattered and youth was fleeting. During those fleeting days life was about on reaching the top of the social hierarchy. Spend your youth clawing for good grades, good friends, a good reputation, high class rankings, a good university, a good job. Fail during those quickly passing years and consequences could range from a permanent loss of a chance at happiness to a quiet but certain removal from the eyes of society.

And if you do fail? Danganronpa was always there as your second chance. Your only chance. Once you fell behind in the race, or if you started behind in the first place, no matter how hard you sprinted you would never catch up and your chance for self-satisfaction or respect had outrun you. The only way to win was to restart entirely in an entirely different race.

Danganronpa was working. Orphanages and foster care facilities had been closed for years. Delinquency was rare enough to be notable when it did happen. The extreme societal problem with shut-ins and NEETs had disappeared over the course of a decade after the show began. Society was harsh and punishment for deviating from the norm harsher, but Danganronpa kept the country at a constant, undisturbed peace by being the alternative option in case of failure and a distraction from the stress of success.

Why rebel and disturb the peace when the violence, destruction and despair you were denied could be experienced in a safe, socially-approved package? Why raise hell and get punished when you could do it on national television and be beloved for your performance?

 

* * *

 

 

Maybe if he was braver, or at least more concerned with existential questions like that, he would’ve asked his brother for the answers.

His _twin_ brother. His brother, with the exact same face but a smile that could reach closer to his ears than even he could in his absolute happiest moments. His brother, who drew people to his side with a single sentence and put them on a knife’s edge with another. His brother, who slacked off in class and cram school and still managed the top grades in his class. His brother, who had a group of friends at his beck and call to cause reputation-ruining mischief and his brother, who could escape that mischief with a complicated set of lies and alibis intertwined.

Something about the unpredictability of breaking the rules and escaping unharmed drew his brother away and shaped his character into something unrecognizable. Danganronpa didn’t interest him beyond close to instantly figuring out the solution to the individual murder trials as soon as all the evidence was found. _After this long, it’s totally predictable_ , he once said. _There’s nothing new in it to surprise me anymore. It’s all scripted anyway_.

That was the way his brother thought and he was an extra on the set of his twin’s exciting and completely abnormal life. An afterthought that only came up as a minor trivia point or an alibi if necessary- “ _Hey, hey, did you know there’s someone else with my face running around? Maybe he was the one smoking outside the school!_ ”. They were close once, maybe, before they grew out of childhood and their personality differences became apparent. His brother lost interest in his twin’s quiet and thoughtful character when it became clear that he wasn’t going to jump to be a part of his whirlwind life. They must have been very close once, because his brother knew him too well- and knew he was an entirely predictable person.

A _boring_ person. A forgettable person. Someone who would live the rest of his life without ever crossing any finish line first. Someone who’s name would be completely lost from the memories of his former classmates as soon as he graduated. Someone who would never be happy as the person he was or ever would be.

A pop-up ad flashed on the webpage of an online chess game he was playing (and most certainly losing) on one night that was as uneventful and predictable as the last.

_“Become a character in the world of Danganronpa! Taking applications for Season 53 now!”_

* * *

 

 

“My name is… Ouma Kokichi.”

It was such an impulsive decision to do this that he hadn’t bothered to cut his shaggy, scruffy-looking hair. A center lock of his fringe tickled his nose and he nervously brushed it away.

“To be honest, I…. There’s nothing interesting about me. I’m a boring person with average grades, my hobbies are nothing special, just video games and chess, I guess, and, uh, and… I know there’s been normal characters in Danganronpa before that become heroes, like Naegi Makoto of course, but that’s not-“

He cleared his throat, his eyes avoiding the camera’s blinking light. He’d never seen another audition tape before- Team Danganronpa never showed them publicly, out of concern that people would attempt to copy the pitches of winning contestants to get in- but he was sure he was already screwing this up. It didn’t help that he came in his plain, predictable black gakuran and had no props or plans to make his case more interesting.

“…I want to be someone else. Entirely. I don’t care about what happens afterward. There’s nothing about my current self that I enjoy or want to live-“

\--Don’t go in expecting you’ll die. That was the one auditioning tip Team Danganronpa let out. You’re trying out to live in the world of Danganronpa, not die in it. Create a self that could walk into the light of the school door opening after the final trial.

He swallowed, hard, and hoped it put a little bit of color into his pale cheeks.

“….I have this idea for my character. He’s the kid leader of a secret organization, but it’s not like Kuzuryuu Fuyuhiko. It’s more like-“

He found himself blushing as he explained the silly, childish concept of a group of clownish phantom thieves, who only stole and vandalized across the world to cause laughter, not pain and loved each other like family. He wanted to become a tricky and flighty person, a complete opposite his current predictable and reserved self. He would lie, and cheat, and dance around with people’s emotions with impunity, but he would never actually cause any harm. He’d be a step, sometimes a jump, ahead of the rest of them all. And he would enjoy the game- not the murder, not the suffering, but the puzzle and mystery of it all. To the new Ouma Kokichi, the killing game would be another lock to pick or safe to crack and he would do his best to puzzle out the one behind curtain. He didn’t intend for his new self to become a murderer- even if, of course, a fantastically gory and creative execution put you in the memories of society forever- but he hastily explained how the person he wanted to be could create a show-stopping case if that’s what the team wanted for their show.

The long-haired, bespectacled woman sitting in front of him and behind the camera did nothing but smile tepidly as she quickly typed a few notes on her tablet. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not- notes were a sign of interest, sure, but how many were enough for him to be confident that he was “in”?

She was quiet for a moment, the soft clicks of her fingers hitting the tablet glass the only noise she made, before smiling a bit more widely. “Do you have any close family? It’s very popular for contestants to include their family in their fictional backstories. I’m sure they’d love to have cameos in your ‘secret organization’!” The woman laughed lightly. “You know, just to let them know you’re still thinking of them, even if you’ve forgotten who they really are.”

He hoped the sudden, sharp intake of breath at the question didn’t answer for him. But maybe it didn’t matter, because maybe he had already botched this after all.

“…No.”

Lies snowball. He had just packed the first fistful of snow.

 

* * *

 

 

“Twin telepathy” was a fictional trope that he hated and encountered far too often in his daily life. “ _Can you read your brother’s mind? Do you know what he’s thinking at all times? Like those two twins from season 37 who-_ “ he’d been asked countless times and turned away before they finished gabbing nostalgic trivia at him. Being mistaken for his brother was one thing, but this sort of question always cut deeper. No matter who was asking him or in what tone or context they were asking it, it was really always the same question: “ _Hey, are you actually more like your more interesting brother?_ ”

The fact of the matter is he never knew what his twin brother was thinking. Supposedly, they had identical DNA and therefore should have identical brain structures. But like the scar he had on his right index finger after a mishap cutting carrots and his brother’s slightly shorter pinky toe from stubbing it as a baby, the way they had lived as individuals had shaped their formerly identical bodies into distinct forms and beings. Something about how his brother was raised turned his brain into a fast-working network of connections that moved at a speed in which he could never keep up.

But that day, when he opened the door to their apartment and found a table turned over, glass shattered across the floor and not a trace of his brother, he smelled his twin’s fear left lingering in the air and immediately knew exactly what happened and where he was. He felt the depth of his brother’s confused panic in the center of his chest and for once in the 17 years they had lived together he _understood_.

His knees shook as he stepped over the glass, walked to the couch, and picked up the famous wax-sealed envelope resting on a pillow that every family of an auditioning contestant looked for after their child’s customary kidnapping.

“ _Congratulations! Your son has been chosen for this season of Danganronpa! While we can’t tell you the specifics of his role in this season’s storyline, we hope you will enjoy seeing him-_ “

 

* * *

 

 

He wanted to think his efforts to fix the mistake were brave. He wanted to believe in the lie that he had done everything to stop and reverse what he had set in motion.

At first, it was desperate phone calls that were only answered with machine messages, or more often a request to please hold and the number of callers ahead of him. Hundreds of people were most likely calling about something similar (“ _Can I please talk to my child before they’re on the show?” “Was I accepted? I haven’t been kidnapped yet!_ ”) and his special exception was lost in the sea of expected calls.

He tried emails. He sent hundreds, thousands of copy-pasted messages to overcome the tidal wave of people’s questions that were coming through this line of contact as well. He stopped when not a single one was responded to and he realized that Team Danganronpa probably automatically filtered his email address to a spam folder.

He tried to get his father on his side. He spilled everything that had lead up to the mistake, everything that he had lied about, in choked sobs and tears and desperate pleas to help him. But when your family was respectable and your child made it onto Danganronpa not because of failure in life but because of success and charisma (of which his brother had plenty), it was one of the biggest honors a parent could receive. Saving and gaining face was everything. Spreading that it was a mistake and his other son, the lackluster son, had caused it could massively damage his reputation, put his career in jeopardy and mark him as dissident if he took more extreme measures to correct it. His father, then, chose to believe in the lie of his son’s willing participation. For both their sakes, he said.

He tried to go to Team Danganronpa directly at their headquarters. Armed guards stopped him from getting past the front door without an appointment. An appointment required an email or a call. An email or call with a _response_.  

He doesn’t remember the exact day he gave up, but he stopped calling as soon as he saw his brother plastered across an electronic billboard, wearing the costume he had envisioned for himself, through the eyes of the robot boy serving as the viewers' camera- the gimmick this year.

His twin’s smile was to his ears, as always.

 

* * *

 

 

Ouma Kokichi was different than how he had planned. Maybe because of that, he became perversely fascinated with the increasingly horrible character he had forced into being.

It wasn’t the sort of incestuous fascination that had consumed last week’s killer and resulted in the death of two female contestants. He didn’t love this person, even if he had loved the fantasy he had written for his backstory and even if maybe, at one point, he had loved his brother.

He was fascinated because in his most delirious moments, brought on by crushing guilt and lack of sleep and sunlight, it was him on screen. It was his face, his pre-planned character, and every last trace of his brother’s true self was scrubbed from his personality, replaced with a conniving villain that enjoyed the chaos of the game. It would make no difference if the two of them were switched and he was implanted with the character of Ouma Kokichi, SHSL Supreme Leader. He would be doing exactly the same thing as the person on screen was doing because he would have received exactly the same memories and personality as him. It was him on screen, him stealing motive videos, him taunting the dead and encouraging people to let their emotions out through crying, him lying about anything and everything to keep his true thoughts unreadable, him playing Monokuma’s game and throwing his ignorant murder accomplice under the bus.

Oh, there were differences between the planned Ouma Kokichi from his notebook scribbles and the SHSL Supreme Leader laughing on the screen at everyone’s pain and misery, certainly. These differences couldn’t be ignored. But those increasingly disturbing and obvious inconsistencies with his memories and the reality of Ouma Kokichi were easily fixed with a simple, gentle lie _\- I always meant for it to be this way. This was always the plan._

Ouma Kokichi cracked a wide, gleeful and evil smile and screamed out the details of his alliance with Gokuhara Gonta in the murder of Iruma Miu. Without feeling real joy, the boy watching felt his own facial muscles copying the sadistic grin.

Maybe if he stayed holed up in his room and did nothing but let Danganronpa and his twisted, brainwashed brother- the natural consequence of _his_ character planning- consume him, then it really would be like he was the one kidnapped and made into a monster. If he gave up on all the things that made him a person in reality and threw himself into this fictional world, wasn’t he a part of it? Couldn’t he live that lie?

Time only passed by when he was watching Danganronpa and inserting himself into shoes that he created. The reality outside his room moved on without him.

 

* * *

 

 

“ _You’re alone, and you always will be_.”

Was he?

 

* * *

 

Ouma Kokichi was dead.

Ouma Kokichi wasn’t dead.

There was a disgustingly bitter sort of irony in the debate that the surviving contestants were having about the identity of the person in the Exisal.

Both statements were right. Even if he had threw his identity as a twin away when he shut his door and curtains and made himself forget about the barrier between him and his brother’s consciousness, there was a deep sense of loss that flooded his senses as soon the cameras revealed a hydraulic press covered in blood. It couldn’t be anyone other than his twin. “Twin telepathy” was still stupid. But behind layers of thought processes deluding himself into believing that he was that boy on screen, he still knew his brother was gone. Ouma Kokichi was dead.

But he wasn’t dead either. Ouma Kokichi was alive. He was alive, and he was watching them with the sadistic excitement they knew he had for pulling their expectations around, making them second guess everything they heard, seeing them learn painful truths and fall for tempting lies. He was laughing, manically, at their confusion and pain, at Monokuma’s frustration and at the game itself for being tampered with by his own creation. _This is what you get for letting a leader of supreme evil like me, Ouma Kokichi, onto your broken and rigged game. I’ve exploited you._

But Ouma Kokichi had completely, entirely fallen for a lie and it was a lie that he had told himself. And those, Ouma Kokichi said, were the most dangerous ones because they were the most believable.

Kaito Momota came out of the exisal.

Maybe the illusion wouldn’t have been shattered if the astronaut had said nothing about what Ouma Kokichi was thinking behind this plan to ruin the killing game. Maybe he would’ve stayed in that room until he starved to death while dying laughing about how he spoiled Monokuma’s fun and destroyed the storyline of the show for his own amusement, nothing more.

Kaito Momota came out and spoke of a side to his character- his brother’s character- that he had never seen behind his lies and had never understood. The dying boy spoke of a hatred of the killing game so powerful and driving that it drove his brother to sacrifice his own life at a chance to end it. According to the last person who had seen his brother alive, he died with nothing but spite and rage for the people watching him and taking pleasure in his suffering.

Learning that, hearing his brother’s spiteful words repeated towards _him_ , didn’t sting so much as completely paralyze him with pain. The suffocating grief that had been pushed away in favor of becoming his twin’s manipulative persona broke through the emotional walls he had put up and nearly choked him to death.

He couldn’t have, didn’t, foresee any of it. Even when he had planned out his character beforehand, even when he stepped into his shoes in every possible way after Ouma Kokichi turned out different from those plans, he never knew what his brother was actually thinking or feeling. Even when he had thrown reality itself away to become SHSL Supreme Leader Ouma Kokichi in his mind, he had missed something so vital to the core of his- _his brother’s_ \- character.

It was never him on screen, ever, and it never could’ve been. The Ouma Kokichi on screen was a being so completely and entirely removed from himself that he would’ve never become him in any reality. The two of them were never interchangeable blank slates before, or after, the brainwashing. The person he became in his delusions never existed in the first place. The lie he had been living was the lie that it was. It wasn’t him, it was his brother, it was him, it was his way of thinking, _it was his fault_ -

He turned off his phone and never watched a second of Danganronpa again.

 

* * *

 

 

 

He saw the effects of the end before he learned the specific details. Hollowed of anything that made him a unique human being and lacking any drive to restore his humanity, he could only see tangential details about the world around him changing as a result of Saihara Shuuichi’s actions in the hours he spent daily staring out the window.

Sometimes, smoke bloomed from burning buildings far in the distance. A neighbor sprinted down the street to their apartment, constantly looking over their shoulder for someone in pursuit. Police cars, a rarity in years before, blared sirens while racing through the apartment block at a minimum of five times per day.

Danganronpa was gone, he knew that. It was a societal consensus to do away with it, he knew that too. But Danganronpa was peace and he didn’t know what was there to replace it now that it was gone. Chaos and unpredictability for some time, he guessed. A temporary upset in the social order outside his confined, dark room.

Shouldn’t Ouma Kokichi be happy about that?

 

* * *

 

 

Maybe he was more like his real twin (and, perhaps, the fictional Ouma Kokichi) than he gave himself credit for, because he had a specific but un-noble reason why he left his room and entered the real world again. It wasn’t because he thought he could be part of an effort to fix a society that was unraveling at the seams without the stiches of Danganronpa and trying to re-sew its fabric. It wasn’t because his father missed him, or his friends begged him to come out, or because he had a bright future if he just opened the door.

It was boredom, sheer, boring boredom with the predictability of his routine. Boredom because nothing in his sad confined life surprised him anymore. Grief was boring. Depression was boring. He assumed death was more of the same predictable sameness, but forever, which is why he subjected himself to life.

That nobler reason for his continued existence didn’t come as he stepped through his door and walked outside into the sunlight. He didn’t feel truly justified in leaving his room after walking down the street, past the disgusted, fascinated or shocked stares of recognition, past the whispers and calls of a name that belonged to him but was meant for another person entirely. Nothing came to him as he walked past the places he used to enjoy spending time doing nothing of consequence and living an unpredictable life.

That feeling of purpose and justification only came when he looked to a billboard screen for the first time in months and saw a news report of mass theft and abuse of flashback light technology. People were making themselves into the Danganronpa characters that were rejected by Team Danganronpa themselves and starting their own games. Some, it seemed, had their voices drowned out by the majority and didn’t want Danganronpa to die.

His brother didn’t have to stay dead either.

The realization came to him slowly, at first, and then hit like the tidal wave of grief as soon as he realized his brother was dead and the persona he thought he shared with him never existed. But the world had woken up to fiction- _lies_ \- changing reality in ways no one for more than a half century thought possible.  Maybe he could lie to himself, this current version of himself, one last time.

_Danganronpa was always there as your second chance._

 

* * *

 

 

Hope was a word repeated so many times without real meaning in Danganronpa that it became meaningless in reality. Hope was something you cheered for so the survivors would overpower the mastermind’s despair, leave the school, and start the cycle over again. It wasn’t a strong force of change; it was simply a tool to let life continue on as it always had.

It had taken on a new meaning for him now.

He was tentatively holding the flashback light that he had spent hours creating with the help of  talented looters who, in addition to fixing up the flashback light system, had also stolen personality data files from both Team Danganronpa’s headquarters and the virtual reality computer left miraculously salvageable in the ruins of the school. Society-disrupting criminals, as it turned out, were not difficult to bribe with all the blood money his family was sent for his brother’s participation in the game and the entertainment his death caused. But thanks to those people who wanted to bring back the thing that had destroyed two lives so close to him, what rested in his hands was the closest thing to a soul his brother had had, once.

His real twin brother was dead and had a mind that he could never recreate, but the sum total of Ouma Kokichi’s background, memories, feelings, personality, experiences in the killing game and goals his twin left behind never realized was contained in this small device. His real brother was dead, vanished from reality the moment he found the wax-sealed letter in that ransacked room, but the person who he died as could live again. It might just have been enough for some form of redemption.

He felt hope. Truly felt actual _hope_ , the belief in _something better_ after this suffering pulling him forward and giving him the drive to act. His own despair was gripping the core of the chest, but hope was grabbing his hand and pulling him out of despair’s paralyzing clutches.

Turning the flashback light directly at his eyes, he gently closed them. He wasn’t dying, but the empty, damaged shell of a self that currently occupied his body wouldn’t exist after he flipped the switch. One final thing needed to be said by his current self before he was submerged into another lie and became a new version of Ouma Kokichi.  

_Please, let me become him. Please, let me make up for what I did and failed to do. Please, let him live and let him change the world like he wanted to. Please, let me and him live this lie._

_Click._

* * *

 

 

The last thing Ouma saw before closing his eyes and letting his consciousness fade into the pain of ebbing poison was the black, smooth underside of the hydraulic press. He wanted to think clearly, put out one last, rebellious and spiteful message towards the ringleaders of the game, but the poison had finally robbed him of clear thought. At the very least, if he couldn’t manage clear hate, he wanted to think something meaningful. But no such thought came to him.

Momota-chan, unseen to him but understood to be grimacing with confusion but also the determination to carry out his will, pressed the start button once more.

_Click._

* * *

 

 

And with sudden shocking mental clarity, Ouma’s eyes opened again.


End file.
